Confirmation bias is the fancy name for ignoring everybody that disagrees with you. It’s a well-documented phenomenon that might just explain how the doomsayers of the arts world read the same news as us but draw radically different conclusions.

The Straw Man fallacy is a silly name for distorting your opponent’s position until it seems ridiculous1. It’s a bit like the Reductio ad absurdum (where you point out that your opponent’s position actually is ridiculous) but it’s more fun and less honest. Don’t worry, though: most liberal arts professors (and newspaper editors) either can’t tell the difference or don’t care. You can decide for yourself which is going on in this post. Here endeth the epistemology lesson.

For your entertainment and edification I present the Lebrechtomatic2: a machine that ingests benign news stories from ArtsJournal and turns them into groundless anecdotal evidence for the steady decline of, well, everything really.

Lebrechtomatic says: Opera dumbs down with new technology in desperate effort to survive.

Lebrechtomatic says: Ticket prices hit record high.

Lebrechtomatic says: Extinct in the wild, jazz only survives in museums.

Order both the Lebrechtomatic(TM) AND the Sandownista(TM) together and receive a complimentary [stet] copy of Prof. Harry G. Frankfurt’s best-selling blockbuster, ON BULLSHIT (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html) — It’s BETTER than a GINSU !!!!

And if you order NOW, we will throw in Logogriffin’s patented De-Fawning Device. Plug it into your laptop and it automatically erases all content-free responses to any Arts Journal blog.